You may remember her.  Short hair, pixie face, and lungs the size of a swimming pool? 

Seriously, who does not remember her?  She was an 80s icon.

Now she tours as Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo.  They played in Tacoma tonight, and I was there.

Now, I don't review pop culture stuff often, but her show bears a couple notes.

First off,  She Rocks.  At Age 53 her voice shows only marginal inability to hit the highest notes, and while she may not make the 5 octave range anymore, she can more then make up for it in her power, because anywhere she can hit the notes, she hits them hard.

I remember seeing her live concert videos in the 80s and she sound better tonight then she did the.  Spot on, every song.

Neil "Spyder" Giraldo.  A guitar God.  He always had a distinct sound to his playing, and all the years have done is make him better.

The two of them impress me because they clearly love what they do, and love each other.  The joy in the music is clear.  And it may sound smarmy, but their pairing is the best example of soul mates I can muster, because after 24 years of marriage they are clearly still in synch with each other.

She played quite the list of hits.  "All Fired Up", "Heartbreaker","Wide awake in dreamland", "True love", "Shadows of the night". "We belong", "Promises in the dark", "Hit me with your best shot", an impressive acoustic arrangement of her first single "We live for love", the ever present "Hell is for children" and "Let's stay together".  I may have missed a few.

And she also sang Invincible (from the Legend of Billie Jean" with a semi dedication to the troops. 

Overall one of the greatest shows I have been to, and while the seating sucked, the crowds were awful and my seats way too far back, I have to say that having waited 27 years to see her play, it was well worth the wait.

I am a person who believes in justice and not in vigilanteism.

Let me repeat that:  I am a person who believes in justice and not in vigilanteism.

But sometimes it is hard.  One such incident was hearing that convicted mass murderer Jeffery Dammer was killed in prison.

This is another.

The situation involves the rape and murder of Katie Collman, age 10.  The confessed killer is named Anthoy Stockelman, and he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

It seems someone decided that was not enough.

The result was this:

The site I found the story on,  Lost in Lima Ohio: A True Crime Blog, reports that:

The photo was taken after his conviction, and after a relative of Katie's managed to leave a permanent reminder of what Stockelman has done- upon his forehead. It seems that the two were serving time in the same jail when a situation allowing them to come into contact with each other occurred. 

Officially I abhor it.  I denounce it.  Candidly I wish it was not a vigilante, I wish it was court ordered.

And privately, I can't help but feel that he deserved it.

I may not like myself for that admission, but it's honest.  He was a brutal raping bastard and he deserved much worse.

I also want to echo what the original poster said:

I'm updating this. And insisting that you read the update before you read anything else. Because, there is something important that I believe should be shared.

A entire family grieved over the murder of 10 year old Katie Collman. And those that loved her took their grief and used it to create something beautiful, something inspired by the love they have for her. I think it's important to share that. To remind everyone that evil doesn't always breed more evil, and that sometimes out of the most horrific pain comes the most endearing tributes.

The headlines were aghast when CBS announced a racial angle to the new season of Suirvivor:  4 tribes segregted by race.

New 'Survivor' Divides Groups by Race

Get ready for a segregated "Survivor." Race will matter on the upcoming season of the CBS show as contestants will be divided into four tribes by ethnicity. That means blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians in separate groups.

The arguments started immediately:

'Survivor': racism or ratings?

CBS' "Survivor" stuck a stick in a beehive and is probably enjoying the loud buzz it has created.

The original vote-them-off-the-island show sets up camp in the Cook Islands for its 13th edition and establishes a new racial divide, at least according to protest groups, when it airs at 8 tonight.

This time the folks in pursuit of the million-dollar pot of gold will be segregated by race and ethnic background. There will be black and white teams as well as Hispanics and Asians competing against one another.

The alarm bells started ringing before the ink was dry on the press release.

"Just plain stupid … and preposterous," John Liu, a Manhattan councilman and member of New York City's Black, Latino and Asian Caucus told The Associated Press.

"It's not reality TV, it's racist TV," said a spokesman for Hispanics Across America in a Reuters wire service report.

The group's founder called it a "cheap and offensive trick" on Yahoo News. "How could anybody be so desperate for ratings?" Liu asked in that same story.

My thought at the time?  a)  Who cares and b) PR stunt.  I mean since Survivor is filmed in advance, it is not a "live" reality show, this was a foregone conclusion.  They already did it, so announcing it was just a way to generate ratings.

Stunned" and "dismayed" is how Harry Smith, host of CBS' "Early Show," described his initial reaction while talking with Probst, who acknowledged some contestants had "some mixed reactions." Smith said there were some groans around the staff coffeepot and a feeling that "Survivor" had gone too far this time.

I have long been known among my religious friends as a person who doesn't really like the Veggie Tales videos all the much.  To me the represent an interesting contradiction of which I may blog on later.

But they are a cherished and beloved form of entertainment to many, and one that promotes biblical values.

IN that regard I respect them.  I may mock them a bit saying things like "I love Veggie Tales: With a good Ranch dressing" but that is all in fun, more to tweak the noses of my friends then really a dislike if Larry.

But there is not mistaking what they are.  They are and always have been a religious expression.  They have always heavily promoted Evangelical Christianity.

NBC decided to capitalize on the 50 million in video sales that the Veggie's have to their credit, and brought them on to mainstream...sort of.

But the took them and they boiled and sanitized them into a mushy meaningless mess.  They removed much of the references to God.

Michelle Malkin at Hot Air takes them on here:

http://hotair.com/archives/2006/09/29/muzzling-the-veggie-tales/

The news story is here:

God references quashed; 'VeggieTales' creator steamed

Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber always had a moral message in their long-running "VeggieTales" series, a collection of animated home videos for children that encourage moral behavior based on Christian principles. But now that the vegetable stars have hit network television, they cannot speak as freely as they once did, and that has got the Parents Television Council steamed.

Two weeks ago, NBC began airing 30-minute episodes of "VeggieTales" on Saturday mornings. The show was edited to comply with the network's broadcast standards, said NBC spokeswoman Rebecca Marks.

"Our goal is to reach as broad an audience as possible with these positive messages while being careful not to advocate any one religious point of view," she said.

The shows creator says he was surprised:

"VeggieTales" creator Phil Vischer, who was responsible for readying episodes for network broadcast, said he didn't know until just weeks before the shows were to begin airing that non-historical references to God and the Bible would have to be removed.

In all fairness to Mr Clinton here is an old video that Clinton actually approved of as he was leaving office, and it shows the man as having a very good sense of humor. 

Gotta Love Jay Leno.

Note, the original video was removed, but here is a longer one that showcases a lot of media reacoitn and has the leno clip at the end.

Several times over the last year or so, Hugo Chavez has opened his pie hole and spewed some anti Bush or anti American vitriol. And each time his ranting has been reported, on its heels comes the call to Boycott his gasoline company, Citgo.

The latest round comes after Chavez decided to take the dignity of the UN, such as it is, and turn it into his personal anti Bush tirade. To recap:

And…

Ah, feel the love.

You can ready my thoughts on that here.

So I wasn’t all that surprised to see several prominent bloggers beginning to discuss the boycott of Citgo.

Now, as this is not a new thing, Snopes has already done a spread on what they think about the boycott idea, excerpted below:

I want to take a quick moment to express why I participate in the Blogburst most weeks.

The ACLU is an enigma to me.  On the surface their goals are noble, lofty and just.  And, as critics have often told me, they have been involved in some very important and supportable cases.

But too often I find myself wondering if their liberal agenda is at work cherry picking their cases.  Too many of their cases seem to take such an extreme position.

So my goal in regard to the ACLU is to expose their extremism and hopefully be a part of the encouragement of an agenda that is less about activism and more about constitutionalism.

This weeks Blogburst, courtesy of Jay at Stop the ACLU.

In case you haven’t heard, a group of dissenters from the ACLU are rebelling and calling for a change in the current leadership of the main organization. The summary of things this new group is fed up with is hypocrisy and the ACLU is full of it. Purging the ACLU of its hypocrisy is bound to be a Goliath task.

Where do we even begin with the ACLU’s hypocrisy? How about its odd stance on the Second Amendment? They have decided that the term “the people” that is contained in the Second Amendment does not apply to “the people” as it does in all of the other rights contained in the Bill of Rights. Instead they say that the Second Amendment only applies to militias such as the National Guard. They defend even the most radical free speech issues as individual rights, but somehow have adopted the opposite position on the Second Amendment.

In August of 2005 the New York ACLU sued against random bag searches on the NY Subway. Ironically the NYCLU HQ has a sign warning visitors that all bags are subject to search.

Ok, it's over the top slightly but I still had to laugh.

Let me preface this by saying that Possum at Roadkill and I generally have a good deal of respect for each other, even when we disagree.

One thing we have butted heads on is alignment.

Politically, I am a fiscal conservative social moderate, which usually labels me a centrist.  But the word moderate to Possum means you have to have a perfectly middle of the road philosophy, which in his opinion apparently translates to "hate everyone".   So when ever I lean a little to the right, which I admittedly do, I am hounded by him as a moderate in training.

Well Possum is MINO, a moderate in name only because he seems to fly far out to the left fringe at a moments notice, then springs back toward the middle for a while.

Unlike me though he seems determined to maintain the fiction that he is moderate.  I encourage the reader to review his comments in my blog and see how moderate he is.

Tuesday he posted a blog about the President Clinton/Chris Wallace interview.  Here is how he opened:

REPUBLICAN PARTY SUICIDE - THE NEW REALITY SHOW

By now most of us interested in politics has had a chance to view – or review – the “debate” between Bill Clinton and Chris Wallace aired by FoxNews over the weekend, and bootlegged by the Beavis channel over at YouTube…  

So wait, an interview with Clinton was Republican Party Suicide?

An interesting twist.  I eagerly sought the logic, the research and the painstaking observations that must accompany that.

I didn’t watch it – I don’t watch TV – and I won’t stoop to the level of the Drudge class hatemongers and patronize the Youtube crap, which, according to Crooks and Liars, has been deliberately altered to WJC’s detriment…

I had no trouble finding the unedited video, so I don't understand his laziness.

And to rely on Crooks and Liars, a Liberal Pothole in the Roadkill highway, why it cannot be that he trusts liberal sources could it?